Abstract

Judicial institutions which provide legal mechanisms for conflict resolution play an important role in maintaining the social order of complex societies. Weaknesses in the performance of their duties can contribute to social conflict developing into outright violence that will be beyond the management of law and the courts. In this sense it is strategic to study the judicial system and the decision-making processes of its judges if one wants to understand the ways conflicts are dealt in a certain place and time. In this article we focus our attention on the role of the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court as custodian of the Constitution and the discourses that its decision-making construct when dealing with human rights issues. Specifically we set out to understand how the opinions of Brazilian Supreme Court Justices are constructed when deciding cases concerning freedom of religion. The timeline considered covers 31 years, from 1988 to 2019, a period that begins with the promulgation of the new constitution in 1988 (which symbolically reinstated democracy in the country after the end of the period of military rule that began in 1964) up to the present day. We begin by presenting the legal definition of freedom of religion in Brazil which constitutes the normative background of the discussion. We then discuss our project, stressing the methodological approach we have adopted and finally we present our data findings. We identified 39 cases in total of which 11 were selected and analyzed using the methodology of Semiolinguistic Discourse Analysis in order to define the semantic field related to freedom of religion in Brazil. Even though the number of cases is not large it is possible to identify some features of Brazilian legal culture which are also recurrent when dealing with religious freedom. One of these features is the absence of consensus-building logic in the Justices’ opinions—we attribute this to what we term the disputatio mindset—which contributes to continuing institutional instability and legal insecurity. Our findings suggest that these Supreme Court decisions frequently lack the strong level of rational consistency that lower courts require if they are to identify clear guiding principles that can control the outcomes of new cases

中文翻译：

---

三个十年期间巴西最高法院的宗教自由

摘要

提供解决冲突法律机制的司法机构在维护复杂社会的社会秩序方面发挥着重要作用。履行职责中的薄弱环节可能导致社会冲突发展为彻底的暴力，这将超出法律和法院的管理范围。从这个意义上说，如果人们想了解在特定的地点和时间处理冲突的方式，那么研究司法系统及其法官的决策过程就具有战略意义。在本文中，我们将注意力集中在巴西联邦最高法院作为宪法保管人的角色以及其在处理人权问题时的决策基础上的论述。具体来说，我们着手了解在决定有关宗教自由的案件时，巴西最高法院大法官的意见是如何构成的。审议的时间表涵盖从1988年到2019年的31年，这段时期始于1988年颁布新宪法（象征性地在1964年开始的军事统治时期结束后恢复了该国的民主），直至今天。我们首先介绍巴西宗教自由的法律定义，该定义构成了讨论的规范背景。然后，我们讨论我们的项目，强调我们采用的方法论方法，最后介绍我们的数据发现。我们确定了39个案例，其中使用半语言话语分析方法进行了选择和分析，以定义与巴西宗教自由相关的语义领域的11个案例。即使案件数量不多，也有可能确定巴西法律文化的某些特征，这些特征在处理宗教自由时也经常出现。这些特征之一是大法官的意见中缺乏建立共识的逻辑（我们将其归因于我们所说的争议心态），这助长了持续的机构不稳定和法律不安全感。我们的调查结果表明，最高法院的这些裁决常常缺乏下级法院要确定可以控制新案件结果的明确指导原则时所要求的高度的理性一致性。